A Day in the Life of Jim Beckett's Watch
by rosiespleen
Summary: When Kate Beckett lost her mother, she started wearing a piece of jewellery to remind her of life that had been snatched away.  Her father's watch was given to her for another reason.
1. Chapter 1

_A bit of a change of pace with this piece. It's a six-parter and it focuses primarily on Beckett and the watch her father gave her. Although she's listed as the major character, Jim Beckett, Castle, Sorenson and Royce also feature. This was released on LJ a while ago and is completed, so I'll post a chapter a day. Happy 407. : D_

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><p><strong>Part 1: Life Lost<strong>

It was Italian, of course, her very favourite.

The familiarity of red and white checkered tablecloths, the yeasty tones of crust, cheese and celebration, as ingrained in the upholstery as the chianti stains on the bench tops. She spotted her dad as soon as she entered the restaurant. Kate didn't expect a huge Jim Beckett smile or his typical standing bear hug. Her father had his nose out of joint about the speeds she was (allegedly) clocking on her Harley, and _Jesus, Dad, I AM riding at the right speed …_

'I've seen you fly up the street. Don't think that I haven't.'

'Yeah? Well I'm in control, okay. I'm old enough to know, and it's really none of your business.'

She'd stomped out of the house a couple of days ago. He'd been working, she'd been at college and they hadn't had cause to butt heads in the meantime — not that they were always at each other like some of her friends and their parents, but they were father and daughter, strong-willed and pigheaded. Turbulence was as inevitable as him ordering the pepperoni pizza at this particular restaurant.

'Hey, Dad,' she said, putting her leather jacket and helmet on the fourth seat. She was disappointed that her mom hadn't arrived already, it would have been nice to see Johanna's friendly face. Her dad had his grim mouth on, and his lips thinned to nothing when he noticed the dent in the side of her helmet.

_Not again._He didn't even need to speak for Kate to read the chapter on Fatherly Lectures.

'What?'

She sounded like a petulant 13-year old, something that Jim could evoke by simply being her dad and having the nerve to make judgement calls about what a 19-aged old woman might do. Or not. _How dare he?_

'I'm not going to remind you — _again_ — about replacing your helmet, but you _are_late. Tonight of all nights.'

Kate bit back a reply about being purposely late so her mom would already be here, sitting next to Judge Jim, soothing the tension between husband and daughter. She opted to continue the argument to prove she was right. On both counts. She did _not_speed, she was on time. College Kate time.

'I'm not that late, _Dad_.'

'You are according to me, _Kate_.'

His tone was softer, although he emphasized 'Kate' with the same serve of snide as she'd coloured her 'Dad'. His face started to crease along his handsome smile lines but Jim stopped himself short. He obviously wanted to make a point. She watched him chug at the sleeve of his out-to-dinner shirt, hoisting his hand so that the cuff fell away from his watch.

The black band of the timepiece was a slash of consistency. If Jim Beckett was awake, on the job, being her dad, Kate could always depend that he'd be wearing this single dash of jewelry. He was a practical man. His watch reminded her of a time when he seemed as tall as the tree in the neighbour's yard, and as princely as the man she'd grow up to marry.

In her twentieth year, she was a shade taller than him, her heels boosting her up to the realization that her father wasn't tree height, wasn't a prince by title, and would probably disapprove of anyone she wanted to marry at this particular moment. But his watch was a constant. Manly, set into the architecture of his wrist, never overridden on occasions such as these.

'Twenty minutes, Katie. It's okay now, seeing as your mom is too, but I would've liked you to make the effort.'

'Did you ever think that I might be late coz I didn't want to speed in traffic?'

This drew a smile from his lips. He had a contagious grin, but it coincided with a click of his tongue against the roof of his mouth, and Kate knew he was annoyed with himself for not stifling his admiration at a typical smart-ass comment. She couldn't always beat him this way. He wasn't a pushover as far as his moods were concerned, but they were now at the point in their lives where he had to admit that he couldn't make her do anything. She could vote, she could drive, he was her dad, but he wasn't _Daddy._

He placed his elbows on the table and steepled his fingers together beneath his chin. Kate's gaze focused on the slip of his shirt cuffs, the exposure of his watch that lay quartzing against the regular crank of his radial pulse; the blood tributary from his heart. Steady, firm, predictable. The man. The sameness and reliability between heartbeat and personality. _Her father._

'Do you wanna order something to drink?' he asked, his eyes squinting the way they did whenever he was attempting to understand the sway of his daughter's mind. Kate had noticed that they never, ever narrowed his gaze when he spoke to her mother, as though he trusted the communication to be open, to be untainted by teenaged emotion and willfulness. Another distinct difference in the way he interacted with his wife and his daughter.

'Sure.'

They didn't talk for a while, content enough to consult the waiter, glance over to the entrance in anticipation of Johanna's arrival, sip on something cold while the atmosphere between them warmed up. Kate finished her drink with a final tug on the straw. It was only when her father flicked at his cuff in agitation and wriggled the face of his watch towards his own, did she realize that her mom was getting too late. Even for a busy legal lady.

'Have you called her?'

Kate asked the question but knew the standard response. Her mom wasn't a cellphone advocate, wouldn't answer if she was in the middle of something important, probably hadn't looked at the time if there was a new soul to save. Kate's eyes glazed over a little. She was tired after an all-night study group turned into a garage jam with a couple of the guys who were forming a band, someone had brought out some weed, some booze …

'She's probably lost track of the time, Dad. We could go home? Meet up with her there?'

She watched a range of emotions hassle his eyes. Annoyance, indecision, concern. Jim made to say something, thought better of it, and gave more attention to his timepiece. It was as though the tick of the second hand would manifest her mother. She'd come scurrying in between the big hand and the date, swept away by an apology that she was trapped in the moment, had forgotten about the hour.

They sat. Kate made daughter-talk stretch into 30 minutes, focusing on studies and the price of fuel and 'how are those damn Yankees goin'?' while her dad muttered about stats, work, the strength of the dollar, the problems in Kosovo. They ordered. It was half-hearted and another form of Jim Beckett procrastination.

'Your mother would want you to be eating.'

It was Italian. Her mother's favourite. Of course she'd want Kate to be eating.

And when they ran out of things to say, of excuses to give Johanna, of morsels to consume, Jim's procrastination morphed into resignation. He stole a final look at his watch and sighed. Weird how this single freeze-frame of her father and his watch imprinted itself on Kate's memory forevermore. It was the final time he spoke Johanna's name while believing that she was still walking among them. It was that significant. But not.

'I guess she'll meet us at home, then.'

It was only when Raglan's words were shed, strangling the crap out of the air, stabbing the sense from her world, that Kate understood. _Consistency, regularity, sameness?_As gone from her life as the beauty of her mother's smile, the present thrill of a mother's love. The routine was gone from her life … until such time she chose to reclaim it.

As she curled to the floor, fetal-like and smashed, deathly silent in her shock and gutter-grief, Jim's hands cradled her from his sitting position on the couch. In his movement forward, his arms sought her from above. He gulped at her, as though trying to envelope her in a fatherly 'FRAGILE' label, like one that might be found on a precious FedEx package. Somehow, someway, the face of his watch lined up against her cheek, grazing it uncomfortably, sending her spinning back to the restaurant, him checking his watch, and the thought that Johanna Beckett was just around the corner. _Late, but just around the corner. She's on her way, just around the corner ..._

The only noise Kate heard that night, once Raglan had 'head on out', was the ticking of a once-predictable life draining away as readily as her mother's blood. Gone. Until such time she chose to reclaim it.


	2. Chapter 2

_thanks for the comments and interest in this one. It's one of those stories I'm glad I wrote (as I usually prefer comedy/romance) and it's a pleasure to share it here. I really appreciate the read and the kind words._

_The first part of this chapter is purposely written in 2nd person, as though to give Beckett distance from the harrowing situation. _

_Warning: parental alcoholic abuse.  
><em>

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><p><strong>Part 2: Life Saved<strong>

You'd think police training would afford you an armour. A steel-backed uniform that'd protect your psyche from shrinking, your mojo from free-falling, your fucking heart from splintering into a gravel rash that rubbed against your kidneys. The pain was like passing a stone. Bearing witness to his unravelling was like watching a possession scene from a horror movie.

Surely your police training helped?

Nope. Nothing, not even the viscous nature of physical drills or the mind-strengthening techniques taught at the academy prepared you for the sight of your own father.

There he was again. Lying face down in the remnants of a 24-hour bender, stripped to the waist with his arms askew, jutting out from his body like a bizarre stick insect that had been squashed by a scotch shoe and drowned in a rubber sole. His watch faced upwards. His forehead down, the leather band of the watch drenched in sticky alcohol, his soul trying to find the gap between his sorry existence and her death.

But it wasn't the first time you'd found him like this, although it was the only instance you'd thought of the situation this way. Second person distancing and referral? Trying to deny that you owned this scene, because if you referred to the characters as 'you' and 'him' you wouldn't have to face the awful realization.

Kate and Jim. Father and daughter and the ghost of the murder that haunted their every waking moment, their collective non-sleep, his drunken stupor. Her exposed heart, every single time she wasn't wearing her police vest. Sometimes, even when she was.

It wasn't until you glimpsed an image of yourself in your own hallway mirror that you admitted the the characters had a face. _You,_ the newly rookied Beckett, shiny and in a uniform so lint-free, it might have been prepared by a proud mother for her graduating daughter. And _him_, Jim Beckett. Her father, the practical, paternal man. Her father, the walking, wounded widower. Her father. _Hers._

Kate made a lot of noise. In the past, she'd approached her dad's boozed body with trepidation, much as a virgin detective might creep towards her first kill site. She was neither virgin nor detective. She was a daughter with a man-sized problem, and once again she wished that her training might have soldiered her emotionally for this particular confrontation.

'Dad? Hey?'

She prodded at his watch arm with her toe. Kate was physically able to deal with her father from this level. She refused to squat down and nurse him into consciousness, although tough love pained her almost as much as tender, daughterly care. _It all hurt like hell_ But she couldn't over-think the way she'd been dealing with him — _it_— over the last six months, otherwise she'd lose things. Like her resolve, the memory of their family unit, her willingness to help a man who couldn't help himself. The texture of her mother's face, so difficult to access at moments like these.

'Thought we were s'posed to get to that meetin' tonight,' she said, roughening up her words in keeping with the attempt at full-body armour veneer. It might be working externally, but Kate's insides were weeping as rampantly as that grief waterfall in the early days after the loss.

She'd angered up since then. She'd staged through the phases of grief and raked the bitter seeds over the gravestone of that particular Kate Beckett incarnation. It was the annoyance factor that had her bending from the waist and grabbing at her father's limp arm to get a closer look at the time. There was no getting to the AA session tonight and she was as pissed as her father was wasted.

Kate was suddenly beyond agitation. Yeah, she wore sorrow like her cheap, tacky Swatch — every day, tucked just under her sleeve — but the anger waxed and waned like the mood swings of a teenage daughter and a menopausal mother. _If only._

The early days had been different. She'd ranted, raved, necked vodka shots till she stumbled, even hooked up with people she probably wouldn't have chosen, just so they could harness her pain and change it into something else. Something worse than her mother's death (never happened) something tangible and energy-sapping, something that could flood her senses in every way her misery was clogging them up.

It had worked for about two minutes each time.

Her Swatch had told her so, as surely as her father's Omega pulped the air with news that they'd never hit tonight's meeting. They were already 20 minutes late and miles away from the centre.

She sighed and bummed down on the first couch she'd ever owned. It was comfortable, sturdy and reliable, something she'd bought when a work email advertised the move of a family overseas and the sale of the furnishings they couldn't take. Pity she couldn't fix her dad with the ease that she'd spent her first few paychecks. Pity her father couldn't have the rebound potential of her Training Officer, a man who would never sink to such despair in the aftermath of life's tragedies.

Why couldn't her dad man up? It was simple. She was doin' it, Royce did it every time they saw a new, hideous bit of human frailty in their day, her mother would be doing it if the situation was reversed.

She caught herself judging. Exactly what the sponsors at AA had expounded _not _to do, but goddamn it? Her father wasn't supposed to fall into a vat of 50-proof liquor while she was trawling her cop-life to enforce truth, justice and the American way.

_Jesus!_His watch alarm sounded and it spun Kate into a residual memory of a summer night, a family gathering and her father's watch announcing to everyone that the BBQ was finally preheated enough for the steaks to be sizzling. The continual beeping nuked her back to a moment when she was about twelve. Her father opened the amazing, classically discreet watch case that her mother and she had wrapped with so much care it almost bought tears to her eyes. HIs birthday, such a handsome man, such a happy morning. He had tried the alarm as soon as he received his gift, enthralled with the mechanism, overwhelmed by the beauty of giving, the love of his family.

_Dad. Please, dad. Get up and be okay. We need you. We need you still._

As the alarm bleeped onwards, she understood he wouldn't be responding to his watch tonight, despite the familiar sound unleashing a cavalcade of memories. He was drowning and she was inept at swimming the stroke of the drunken damned. Police training had taught her to kick at the victim when the water got too high and the drowning man threatened to pull the rescuer under, but it hadn't equipped a daughter to swim away from a father stuck in a rip tide of his own squalor.

She'd stay, treading water beside him, praying that he'd relearn some sort of self-preservation technique while she was around. She wouldn't let him lean on her in case she went under, wouldn't hold onto his shirt or grab at his arms to assist him, but she'd thread her fingers through his watchband. She was there, but not, with a quick release clause in case she found she couldn't partially support them both and needed fast distance between them.

Basic survival techniques, 101

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><p>She cried after the fact.<p>

When countless moments passed in a blur so unreal it seemed like everything was spinning a slow-motion/quicktime conundrum, she allowed herself to shed tears for her father. While he drank, she ran herself ragged. She could hardly decipher work from rest, brooding from emoting, until the point where she hadn't seen him for over two weeks. She worried, but she didn't care. She went out dancing, she thought of her dad, but she wasn't concerned. _Like hell_. She awoke in the dead of night, desperate, sweating, reaching for his quick-escape watch band, but she didn't really _care_.

All the time treading water.

Jim sent her a brief text. He didn't email. He hadn't called around or answered her voice mail messages, but he was alive. Somewhere. Kate shrugged away her thoughts as she waited in the supermarket line. She shook her head as she drove home from work. She couldn't possibly do any more. She went to the movies with a cop from the neighbouring precinct and invited him back for cathartic reasons. What else could she do? She was donning her own oxygen mask first.

Her father was out there somewhere, Kate still had her finger in the crook of his watchband.

So when he arrived at her apartment, shaved cleaner than he'd been for immeasurable time, Kate caught her breath as the door caught the air between them. It was fresh. The soak of stale alcohol was gone, his clothes were clean, but the rims 'round his eyes spoke of sunken, remorseful times. The most _difficult_ times. It had almost been a month.

'I'd have bought you flowers, but this ain't a fairytale,' he said, using one of the lines they'd memorized from an old cartoon they used to watch before dinner time on a Sunday. She was about nine. She'd half sit on his lap, they'd laugh together, he'd rub her back and tickle her armpits.

'Dad ...'

Kate wanted to use the light, scripted lines, she wanted to play along with _'well, didn't you bring me a diamond ring? I am the princess of this here castle'_… but she couldn't. She stood silently, using her cop assessment to check if he had brought anyone along with him, had a sponsor in his back pocket or a bottle of Jim Beam up his sleeve.

'Can I come in?'

His tone diffused the situation. He sounded … normal. Like a dad. _Hers._

'Yeah. Of course.'

Without waiting to see if it was okay, to gauge whether his daughter would permit it, Jim stepped forward and wrapped his arms around Kate's body for the first time since their darkest days. Weird that she suddenly felt lighter than she had in an age with the drowning man leaning on her, weighing into her personal space. But he wasn't pushing her under in an attempt to get out of the tidal rip. Jim was bolstering her, trying to reestablish the nurturing holds of their past.

She tried not to sob, but she did. His body shook slightly too and Kate was unable to differentiate his tears from hers as they blended on cheeks and collars. It didn't matter.

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><p>He gave it to her on a Thursday night, gift-wrapped and beautifully mounted in the same jeweler's box that her mother and she had given him all those years ago. He'd had the band replaced. He told her that the face of the watch had a makeover, and she laughed when he said he sounded like one of those 'queer eyes for a straight guy fella'.<p>

Kate quietened. She didn't appreciate she was holding her breath till she asked, 'Why, Dad? I don't know if I can. It's not that I don't _want_it, it's just that—'

'You'll never be late again,' he said, in typical fatherly fashion, a wry smile stretching his lips and almost softening the lines of suffering around his eyes. He reached his hand over the table, careful to avoid the crust of their well-eaten pizza in this, their new meeting place far enough away from Johanna's old favourite. 'It's a reminder, Katie. About life. About time and us and precious memories. I want you to have it.'

As simple as that.

Kate took the watch off the soft, velvet-like mount that had seemed so very exotic in its day. The piece felt heavy in her palm, the face had been buffed to within an inch of its old life. With slightly shaking hands, she wrapped the new leather strap round her wrist, making note that her father had updated this with a thinner band than the one he used to wear, and the fit was comfortable. Familiar, the tangible reminder of the time they had together and the time that was yet to come.

'Thank you.'

Her voice was coloured with everything she couldn't say, everything he'd implied in his few words about the watch, everything he'd endured in an effort to get sober. Kate knew enough about them both to realize that neither she nor Jim were out of the death-orientated woods yet. Would they ever be? But their obsessions and demons were semi-contained at this precise moment, and that was all her mother was sure to want as she watched over them this night.

The Beckett watch ticked its tattoo against her wrist. Perhaps her life would become more routine — more predictable — on her dad's watch, but only time would tell.


	3. Chapter 3

_A couple of warnings here: sexual scene and some swearing. This chapter features my take on Kate's relationship with Royce. It's not spelt out in the show, which I really like, and it leaves everything open to the imagination._

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><p><strong>Part 3: Life Adjusted<strong>

Kate didn't know he couldn't sleep at night. She had no notion of her father's imagination working overtime, his head telling him that she was probably safe, his heart reminding him that she was working the streets, engaging the hounds of hell that had mauled his wife to death.

He hoped his timepiece watched over her, however trite that sounded in his head.

He didn't know the extent of her obsession. He thought he did, but Jim had no idea that his daughter was burning the candle at both ends until the wax crusted around her eyes and liquified whenever she unearthed something new about her mother's death.

She wasn't sure if her father had quietly relapsed. Had she smelt whiskey that night last month? Rum? Was his hand shaking, were his eyes extra blurry? Kate didn't know until the morning he came clean a fortnight later. They started their 'days sober' count again, and it was okay. It had to be okay.

He didn't know she'd cut her hair really short — 'edgy' she'd called it — until she marched down the aisle of their new favourite place, threw her purse into the booth and locked her version of Johanna's eyes on him. He wasn't sure he liked it initially. He wasn't sure that it mattered.

She didn't know that a woman from his work had asked him out on a date. She didn't want to, so when Jim mentioned something about a recent evening, Kate tuned out and channeled her mother's love for the man. She knew Johanna would want him to be happy. She couldn't be replaced. Jim wasn't interested in trying.

Jim didn't know that Kate was falling for her training officer. Kate didn't know that her dad struggled to fill the conversational holes between them. The things that needed to be said were addressed, and their companionable silences were punctuated by smiles, a hand hold now and then, a glance at her watch, a raised fatherly eyebrow. Kate wasn't aware that he felt a failure.

Jim wasn't too distressed about his small dalliance with the booze, of his enjoyment of female company for the first time since his wife's death. There was no great shame, but he was unsettled by a wish that he could give Kate her mother as easily as he gave her a hug. She needed emotional support, he gave her his watch. She needed female nurturing, he bought her dinner and spoke to her about life's difficulties. Kate needed advice about things he had no concept of — the secrets of sisterhood, the trading of similar experiences — but he could only provide her with the practicalities of paternal guidance.

At least he was sober these days. At least she was probably past the need for her mother's female perspective. At least she had something of his that could remind her that he was _there_. If not for the specifics, at least for the common journey.

_But she wasn't past all this need, dad!_

There were moments in her life when her mind screamed for something from her mother. Some words, a sentiment, a whisper in her ear when she was on the cusp of sleep. Some advice about men, love, trust, other women, jealousies, friendships.

Jim didn't know that the moments existed like small stab wounds in Kate's conscious thoughts. Kate tried to replace the sound of the need with the hurtle of sirens en route to a crime scene and she would feel a little better. It was temporary, but she felt more sophisticated, in control, and grateful for an external chaos to raid her thoughts.

During quieter times, she felt pathetic, like a teenager dressed in adult's clothing, her father's grown-up watch at her wrist, her mother's matured jewellery round her neck. _She shouldn't need this_, a constant feel for her mother's presence, a sign that she was still around. Kate was dealing with her grief. She was working her way in the world, running to time as surely as her dad's Omega strobed each second of her nightshift.

She didn't know what else to tell herself.

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><p>He was every living cliche a young cop could want in her life. Dry land while she was drowning, true north during the eye of a storm, a rock in an ever-changing seascape of grief, new career, on-the-job training, finding feet.<p>

Mike Royce was that little bit larger than life. And he was there, every single day of her pitiful transition from rookie to streetwise.

He called her kid and sometimes, when he teased her about the length of her hair, the size of her watch, the sheer idiocy of wearing hoop earrings to a raid, she'd call him 'old man'. She didn't wear hoop earrings, for chrissakes. Maybe if she was working in the eighties …

As Kate grew more confident of their relationship, she even referred to him as 'old man' in front of their colleagues, and it earned her a twinkle of his eye, a crinkly grin or a further comment about something he considered too 'girlie'.

The gruffness of his voice compelled her to work hard, though he didn't bark commands like some training officers. Royce tended to be direct, colouring their interactions with story spinning and jokes and jibes.

'Ya see, kid,' he said to her when they'd been working the beat for a month. 'There was this one time, at band—'

'God, Royce. Don't start on this band camp story again. It's gettin' old.'

Kate was growing tired of Royce telling her that he was a maestro at every musical instrument from the cello to the bass guitar without him ever offering to demonstrate the skill. He sang like a barnyard pig on meth. She knew his musical ear was non-existent, but he kept up the running commentary of pretense anyway, spinning tales that played with her head after the humour died down.

She was sick of it. But not.

'It's true, Kate. At band _practise_ one day, I got called up in front of the entire orchestra and the conductor said that I moved him to tears. I was so damn _good_, I moved him to—'

'Yeah. He was crying. You sounded like you were dead?'

Royce raised his hands from the steering wheel in mock disbelief. 'You're out of line, kid. You wait! Wait until the day I serenade you and you'll be eating your words. I was the best out of any student. Anywhere!'

'Right. And this was what? When you were at Juilliard?'

'You got it! You know, one day? You're gonna make a great detective. You listen to facts, you know the truth.'

It was during her time with Mike Royce that Kate perfected the art of simultaneously rolling her eyes and scoffing. It was easy with him. He guided without pushing, he joked without wanting more, and he didn't probe with his eyes or tell her to quit obsessing over the past.

He was easy. _It_ was easy.

That day, he drove them to a robbery callout in New Jersey. They cased the antique store, interviewed the owners, discussed paperwork and procedure and the right thing to do. Just before finalizing the work, Kate found a wooden jewellery box in a stack of smaller items to the left of the counter. It was classic, pre-loved and had a spot for a photo on top of the lid. It's gold clasp opened to reveal a black cushioned interior.

She felt Royce's presence behind her before he spoke, but she jumped anyway at the sound of his words, low and gruff, against her police-issued collar. 'You sure that big thing you wear on your wrist will fit in there?'

It would. It was perfect.

'I keep telling you that if you forget your weapon, your watch could be used in twenty different ways, Kate.'

She laughed quietly, despite the emotions the jewellery box was evoking. A sense of home. A place to store her snippets of parental love. Something portable and solid and old.

'Yeah, yeah. The watch could be used to knock someone out, in place of handcuffs …'

'… to blind a crook when it's reflecting the sun—'

'Yeah, Royce, I've heard 'em all, right. Point taken.'

'You're still wearing it. It's not regulation, it's gonna get hooked on something dangerous one day, you know?'

She did, but it wouldn't. It was further up her sleeve when she was on the job, and Kate was determined none of the scum of the street would ever get near it. Plus, by wearing it each day, the wild Kate Beckett of old hadn't died with her mother or upon graduating from the academy. It was tokenism rebellion.

She bought the wooden box that day. Royce offered to pay for it and his generosity disarmed her more than his irresistible combination of charisma, charm, work ethic. Kate spent the afternoon wondering why he'd wanted to buy it.

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><p>She wasn't tipsy or broken or drunk at a bar. Kate wasn't on the rebound, nor was he, and she wasn't interested in trying a partner on for size. She knew about police sexual relationships, knew they could destroy working dynamics, even knew that <em>some <em>of them were built on the excitement of the job, the thrill of the chase, the proximity to danger in a 24/7 adrenalin-fueled environment.

Didn't stop her wanting him. Didn't stop her loving him in the way a woman adores a rogue, a girl idolizes an older guy, so Kate simply went for it and didn't second guess the repercussions.

It happened during daylight hours. Her eyes were wide open, his flickered closed as soon as she pressed up against him and snagged his lips in a kiss. She was desperate to hear the crunch of his voice. It was so rough and deep anyway, she'd fantasized how Royce would utter 'Kate' after she'd made it obvious that the time was right.

_No need to over-think this one_.

Life was short, there was nothing to lose and Royce was so easy to read. In an instant, he opened his mouth, tangled her tongue and let his hands wander into her long hair. He walked backwards till his arse hit the barstool that necked his kitchen counter. Only when he'd propped himself on it and allowed her to stand in the gap of his legs did he draw breath.

'Kate? Come on,' he said, his words sounding scratched-out by a peach pit. It turned her on and up more than the hint of his erection, more than the taste of mint on his tongue. He was in uniform too, so was she, and the buzz zapped from her head, down her cleavage and clamped between her legs.

'I intend to. Let's do this.'

She unbuttoned his shirt slowly, closing her eyes to the anxious disbelief in his. She wanted to tell him that this was more than a Saturday fuck, that she actually had these strong, desirous feelings for him, but she didn't. Demonstration was part of her style and becoming a cop had accentuated this tendency. It was his MO too. Words were just there to add confusion to what was obviously a mutually inclusive admiration society.

'You're so fucking beautiful. You think I don't see all the others downtown looking at ya? '

'I'm not interested in all the others, Royce.'

By the time she'd dismantled her shirt and bra, Kate realized the time was here and now. If she let Royce think about more than getting lucky, the dust would settle. He wasn't one for letting it gather too long.

He pulled her against him, their naked upper bodies entwined while he still sat on that barstool, her hips pressing as far forward as his lap would allow. While Royce kissed her with more intensity than before, moving his mouth to the side of hers, Kate linked her hands around the back of his head to remove her watch.

'Thank God,' he said, as he nipped her neck causing her to lean back slightly and hiss in anticipation. 'I thought you were going to take my eye out with that thing. Guess we won't be needing it for a few hours.'

'Royce? So confident?'

'I prefer cocky or cocksure, but yeah.'

Kate was almost relieved that the sex was Mike Royce predictable. No 'are you sure' questions, no 'what ifs' or future predictions of heartbreak and turmoil. He was experienced enough to satiate every one of her desires. Royce was savvy enough to start a relationship and maintain it. For a while. And he was good at it, his form fit, all ropey muscles, equal height, great stamina. Exactly what she needed.

During their time together, he dictated to her body as a true training officer might, but also fell victim to her pure, unadulterated sexuality, her lust for pleasure, her knowledge and own skills in bed. She was no kid. He was no old man. He wasn't the gazetted person in charge.

Until a time when it rained on a parade in NYC during August. It was a local children's fun parade with bonnets and bunting, and they were called to ensure that a violent estranged parent didn't show up to snatch one of his terrified kids. Royce had been quiet for a week, making excuses not to spend the night, and preventing time where they might be alone and she'd force the issue. He was even avoiding long car drives to jobs without the police radio on full volume, and Kate had finally had enough. She hadn't second guessed before. She wasn't going to start now.

They sat in the car, watching the haze of light drizzle. Kate wished she had one of the children's colourful umbrellas to hold above her head, but it wouldn't catch the drops streaming internally. Talking about this sort of stuff wasn't her strong suit, Royce was even worse at it, though he'd hinted at the unlikely longevity of their romance several times over the past few weeks.

The radio was down so low within the confines of the car, Kate could hear the pick of her watch reminding her that life was even shorter now. The drizzle was a silent grey commentary.

'Is there someone else?'

She knew there wasn't. As surely as she knew it had to do with self-esteem — hers, his and the whole collective 'you could do better' bullshit.

'What? No. Course not.'

'Then what, Royce? And please don't go with that whole _oh, you could do so much better than an old man like me, Kate_, because that is just—'

'I won't then. But you know it's the truth, kid.'

The term 'kid' grew a patronizing head and struck out at her like a vicious prick to her ego, while her 'old man' endearment caught in her throat for the rest of the time they worked the beat together. They never fought. _Not really._Kate didn't know what was worse — ending it in a series of stunted questions and comments or allowing the relationship to surge out in a blaze of glory. She would have preferred the latter, even though a blow-up often ended in irreparable carnage.

She got the former. No hard feelings, only another stab wound to add to the steak knife set she already owned.

Retreating to her apartment that Friday night, Kate realized that a broken heart was her default icon and her experience with Royce simply pummeled the bruising round the break.

It was time to steel her backing.

* * *

><p>Discovering she was going to be late, Kate sent a text to her dad so he wouldn't worry. It might only be fifteen minutes, but she and her father had made an agreement that they would <em>never<em> leave one another waiting in a restaurant without notice.

'Nice watch,' said Rachel, the hairstylist adding to her steady stream of conversational observations.

'Thanks.'

'Looks like a guy's.'

'Yeah. It'll go with the hair.'

'I know, right!'

Kate let the words wash over her — a cascade — like the tresses of former Beckett hair that was falling to the ground. The grungy new colour had been completed, Rachel had baulked just a bit at the request for something short, but she was doing a great job of modernizing the look. Kate had sat down as the former kid-in-uniform, the motherless daughter in search of so many things, she could hardly see them all past her disheveled insomniac hair. She emerged from the salon as Det Beckett. Clear-cut, leathered-up, ready to work obsessively hard, hardened to work obsessively well.

As her heels clicked in coordination with the seconds on her watch, Beckett walked down the street in a new direction. It wasn't the metamorphosis of a superhero. Merely the starting gun for a new sentence of time.


	4. Chapter 4

_Three more parts to this one as it ticks along:_

**Part 4: Life Bizarre**

She started to wear her gun like some women might harness a low-slung pair of denim. Kate tried to ignore how right it felt, how the weapon became as entrenched in her ensemble as the chained ring around her neck, the timed leather at her wrist.

The longer she holstered the gun at her hip, the more familiar the sensation, until the day she realized that it was just as easy to shuck her weapon to the floor as it was her comfiest pair of jeans. Didn't mean that she was starting to become desensitized to violence or carrying a weapon, did it? Wasn't it simply like the unawareness she had of her watch and her necklace, the fact that she wore them all the time, and so the sensation was lost?

Whatever the answer, Kate didn't focus too much on noise her gun made as it clattered to the ground beneath the crumple of her jeans. She was too busy with her tiny routine. Open the antique box, unfasten the chain from round her neck, splay the leather band of the watch, remove and close the photographed lid on another day at the office.

_The office._

She used the shooting range regularly. A transfer to Homicide, a bunch of guys who thought they could pop their own weapons better than her, and a need to be at the top of her game drove her to the range whenever she needed the release. _Often_. The place pulled her in, coiled the tension, spurned her forth — as readily as she sunk her finger into the arc of the trigger, imagined her mother's killer and vented.

Kate never noticed the pure balance between her watch arm and the one holding her gun. It wasn't a weight thing, it wasn't that she was aware of either as a scaled point of reference. It was the way she set up, how she positioned her eyes and body for the target sighting. When she extended both arms in synergy, she fired a weapon as a symbol of her need for vengeance, and wore his watch as a sign of the clemency she knew her mother would have insisted upon had she been alive.

The Beckett trinity of tangibles was starting to define Kate. Johanna's ring knocked on her heart, Jim's watch retained face over her strong-arm love for the law, and Kate's gun? It helped her point and deflect.

* * *

><p>Castle didn't tick into her life.<p>

While some men whispered into Beckett's time, stealing moments, wasting minutes, Richard Castle fobbed days. She was aware of how much he'd demand from the second he entered the precinct, so Kate ensured she kept the Beckett trinity close to her vest in an attempt to keep him at a distance.

It was difficult when his novelist observations ran the length of her body, snipped at her brain and tucked below the cuff of her jackets. Just because he appeared to wear his heart on his sleeve didn't mean that Kate was less scrupulous about tucking her clothes over the face of her memories.

Castle noticed it. Just like he took tabs on how she had her coffee, how she read a file, how she interrogated a suspect, and it shook her normally quartz movement and had her swallowing back a split-second of panic. It was the first time she'd nearly driven off the road without being involved in a police procedure. Although her training in defensive and tactical driving helped her recover within the blink of an eye, Kate had never been so pleased to receive a cell call to her car. Castle mentioning her father's watch in relation to how she was reacting to a case was like he'd opened the steel backing to the timepiece, found the winding spring, and yanked.

Other people viewed it as a watch. Castle watched it all as an opportunity to time machine her back story.

'Dad gave it to me after mom died,' she'd told Will, three months into their relationship, although he hadn't asked her much about it. Will had taken it for granted that his cop-woman wore a chunky guy's watch on her wrist. She worked in a male-dominated field, walked the walk, and talked so that the dropped 'g's' on the end of her words heightened her street hoofs.

Why wouldn't she wear her dad's watch? Something feminine, delicate? Might suit Kate Beckett as she hit the town for a night out. Wouldn't appeal to his short-haired, street-savvy cop who used leather to belt a guy's wrists to a pole during a raid, or wrist-locked others into submission when the time was right.

'It's great,' he'd told her that night, as they ate hot dogs on the way home from watching a Clint Eastwood double. 'Keeps real good time, don't it?'

He'd laughed. It was in perfect harmony with her scoff and laconic shove against his shoulder. 'Yeah. And you'd know?'

'Okay, so I don't get to some things on time. Doesn't mean I need a watch, Kate.'

'_Some_things?'

Will had bitten his hot dog, leaned over and pretended to gnaw at hers. Kate recoiled, whacking her wrist against the smack of a street post, cracking the face of her watch in the process.

Uttering a mild profanity, Kate turned her palm downward to find that the front casing had fractured into three, although the glass had remained intact. She remembered her dad telling her that the face had undergone a makeover — he'd said something funny like 'Queer Eye for a Straight Guy' thing? — and she felt that familiar heaviness settle in the bottom of her stomach.

'Damn shame,' Will said, taking her hand and looking closely at the watch as though he expected it to grow into a fatherly howler sent straight from the study of Jim Beckett.

'There's a jeweller on Broadway that we helped out last year. I'll take it down to him in the morning.'

'I can get it done for you, Kate. Was partly my fault anyway.'

She looked across at him, raising her eyebrows in the same way that she had when he'd said that he didn't make _some_things on time. 'Thanks, but it's mine to fix.' Her mind was made up the moment she'd smacked her wrist .

Kate saw Will nod his head in her peripheral vision. He moved their hands to his lips, kissed her knuckles as they started to walk, and threw a cop-quip in her direction. 'A broken watch doesn't mean that it's time for a break, right? But don't look now, babe. The cracks are starting to show.'

In three months they were completely opened, and Sorenson had slipped through one, en route to Boston.

* * *

><p>While Castle? He just couldn't leave things alone. It was almost as if she held a vibrant flame, something so hot it could burn his skin if he touched it. He reached out nonetheless.<p>

The comments, questions, assumptions. Castle knew about her father's watch before Kate knew he intended to ride shotgun for as long as she allowed him an in. But it wasn't _her_ letting him _in!_ She was following orders, humouring the indulged playboy with a predilection for poking among flames that were not his to fan.

Kate didn't drive off the actual road when he asked about the watch, but she swerved straight into a situation where she had to decide. Who was she kidding, she didn't _have _to do anything, but he compelled her. Whether it was the accuracy of his observation that swayed her to share, the fallout from the case, the way he sat and waited … she didn't know, but her memories were out of her mouth before she had the chance to fold them away in the photo-topped wooden box.

It was easier to look down. She focused on her watch and the thread of the chain with its limitless ring of gold rather than maintaining eye contact with Castle. His gaze caressed her, she could feel it as surely as if he reached out a warm palm and rubbed her elbow. She knew he'd be sitting there with eyes softening into the blue of the mood, with his lips slightly apart as though he needed to inhale every memory she owned. She surprised herself. For the little she knew of the man, she trusted that Nikki Heat wouldn't inherit the Beckett back story she retold.

They both cashed in on humour in the end. Used it to finalize the chapter, to save it from drowning in brevity, and Castle was a connoisseur of the one-line distractor of soul-searching. Kate was grateful for the chance to smile, the opportunity to banter her losses away as though they could be shut into a plastic jewellry box in the work situation.

'Until tomorrow, Detective.'

Somehow, it was the tone of his voice that sparked a night of introspection. Kate thought about it as she passed Esposito on her way to the elevator, as she descended into the pits of a precinct that gave her more to do in life than reminisce about a watch on her wrist or a ring at her ribs. She was a _cop_. By definition, by decree. Saying 'night' was what she did, even though waxing 'until tomorrow' might be more hopeful.

Damn him for compelling her to want to know more about what made him tick! The manifestation of a man that seemed to be all about the show — the outward face — but could be something else, something more intricate and finely tuned. The exterior was pure Swiss finesse, all sexy features, inspiring surfaces, shiny buttons that smiled and winked and fluttered. But for the entire night and into the next day, Kate wondered about the machinations that lay beneath, the delicate play of emotional movement, psychological quartz, masculine precision.

She'd watch and see. But with Castle, the problem was that the hourglass could be tipped on its head at any moment and the observer would end up being the grains of sand on display.

* * *

><p>She showered much like she'd work a job. It was methodical, satisfying at the end. Her body responded in a similar way when she had successfully wrapped a case. Warmed, buffed, invigorated, and as Kate washed away the grunge of the streets from her day, she couldn't help imagining Jordan Shaw swooshing down the drain.<p>

Not that they'd parted on bad terms. Simply that there had been one too many chiefs on some aspects of the Dunn case, and Kate was happy to resume the role of Head Cop in Charge of her guys at the precinct, even though Special Agent Shaw had more people than she did.

She showered as part of her conclusion to the working day, to prepare for the demands of the following morning. If Kate wanted luxury and pampering, she'd hit her tub.

Funny thing about tonight's warm water was that it made her feel more alive than usual. If she had the inclination — and, God, she did occasionally when she allowed her mind to indulge in things other than work — she could let herself believe that he was waiting on her couch, protecting her from the city's monsters with his vast arsenal of rapier wit. She'd only have to make one call. _One_, and he'd be bursting through her door with a bottle of red wine and a smirk she'd been wanting to kiss off his lips from the moment he first challenged her with repartee and innuendo.

Castle compelled her. He did, though she'd never admit it to anyone. Compelled her to smile, to consider alternatives, to think laterally, to entertain the idea of him … of _them_…

Kate let the water dapple the expanse of her skin. She was looser tonight, more open to thoughts of fornication and the end of frustration than she'd been in a while, and she didn't need to be a Homicide detective to realize why. The situation with Dunn and Nikki Heat had been huge. Castle's presence, his hero-worshipping of Shaw, his dogged interference in her life — at her place, cooking pancakes — had her twisting behind the shower curtain so that the head of the water spray hit where she needed it. Almost. She wasn't a gymnast, she thought with a grin.

_Her Castle Itch._Starting to irritate her so much, she even capitalized it in her mind as homage to its annoyance factor.

Just as she was contemplating a more tactile form of stimulation, she thought she heard the peep of her cell. She killed the water, found her phone and stopped herself rolling her eyes when she saw the caller ID, hesitating a moment to wonder if he knew exactly what she was thinking a minute ago. He knew everything else, but at least he had to _ask_about her dad's watch. Now it seemed he could read mindsets.

Her internal ticker accelerated at this thought, but it was the weight of his words that set off the alarm as loudly as the stopwatch alert on the Omega.

* * *

><p>She found one-third of her treasured trinity in the wreckage of her old life. She pulled it from the debris, cradled the chain gently and slid it into the borrowed pocket of a coat, as though by nesting it there, she'd find them both a new home before long. The medicos had bandaged the spot where her father's watch usually rested. It was only the lightness of the dressing that reminded her exactly how much she missed its familiar weight.<p>

_Where was it, has anyone found it?_

She heard her voice echo through the charred foundations of the place where she once sat. She once slept. When no one came forward, Kate's confidence died just a tick, but she busied herself, avoiding eye contact or profound conversation for the time being. When she found herself without a home and a case, the remains of her confidence tickled away dead, until she sat opposite Castle on his home turf and reestablished an ounce of familiarity. Some banter, a smile, a 'good night' instead of an 'until tomorrow', and just because she threw the cloth in his grinning face, didn't mean she was going to throw in the towel.

Just because she'd misplaced her father's watch, didn't mean that she'd forget the life she helped to save in her mother's name, or the mother she lost in the process of living this bizarre life.

Because her life, it was bizarre. Castle sat in the middle of it, on an island surrounded by a moat, and Kate was starting to realize that she could become part of that fortress if she could bring down her own walls.

Is that what she wanted, to get inside the keep? To keep him close? Crossing the moat was the absolute final frontier, but she was getting closer to taking some sort of plunge.

It happened. It _was_ happening, and she couldn't pinpoint the second when she started to consider her life on a separate timeline to that etched on the memories of her father's watch. Before Castle — the initials alone spun her out — and now.

He sat opposite her. He always sat opposite her and the moat between them turned to solid unexplored terrain. 'I found it in the wreckage. Had it fixed,' he said, as her bandaged arm flexed beneath her clothes in an attempt to stop her hand from shaking.

_Had it fixed? _Her heart? The remains of her life? The black hole that had once comprised her former apartment?

As Kate looked down on her dad's watch, absorbing the silence between she and Castle for mere seconds, she understood that lots of Kate Beckett could be found in a wreckage. A smattering of tears cleared her vision. It was her life to fix.


	5. Chapter 5

_really appreciate the lovely words about this one. Glad it's striking a bit of a chord here and there and thank you for your interest._

* * *

><p><strong>Part 5: Life Unwound<strong>

Kate was aware she did it. Every time she met up with her dad, she made a judgement on how he looked and filed it away in her detective draw. It was her mental powerpoint. A monthly balance sheet of how he appeared physically, how he was doing psychologically, whether he was overly emotional, vague and distracted, distant or clingy.

It didn't occur to Kate that he had the same running assessment ticking away in his head as he looked at her.

It was a watching game, a face-to-face appraisal of a loved one who would rather listen or quietly observe than discuss the personal details of daily life.

And it worked. Kate gleaned a whole lot from the way he dressed, from whether his eyes were sunken, or his bottom lip was chewed to the point of drawing blood. Her father gathered his intel about the way Kate walked, the hold of her head, the casting of her eyes. If her bottom lip was gnawed to raw flesh, he often guessed that her world was busy or her work perplexing.

It didn't occur to Jim that Kate thought exactly the same about the fleshiness of his bottom lip. It wasn't apparent to either of them that it was a habit they shared in response to certain situations.

Tonight she was biting her lip with the same gusto as she'd sunken a chocolate ice-cream sundae ten minutes earlier. It was the third dinner in a row she'd spoken about Castle. Not that Jim was counting, but for the last three months, Kate had referenced the novelist at least half a dozen times during their conversations and even though he knew she was dating _someone_— a doctor named Davidson — it was confusing.

His daughter rarely discussed other people in detail. She rarely detailed men in her discussion, and certainly not with such regularity.

Kate had mentioned Rick Castle sporadically over the last couple of years. Jim knew about the mystery writer's flair for solving a case by using his vivid imagination, the contacts he had, and how he employed story and drama to embellish the actual evidence.

But in the past, Kate had merely dropped Castle into their conversation. A mere sentence here and there to shade in the grey areas of work life when a case was raised. Mentioning Castle seemed to diffuse all the specifics that Kate would never mention and her father wouldn't presume to ask, although Jim found the theorizing and guesswork involved in solving a murder to be very interesting. He found himself smiling at some of the dabs of Castle paint that Kate shared over their dinners of the past, but lately his daughter had been discussing Rick in terms of landscape.

Something had changed. Dabbles about Castle became longer — like the return of Kate's hair to Jim's preferred length — and she painted him with more vivid brushstrokes as the months marched on. Until they marked time at tonight's dinner, where it seemed that most of Kate's anecdotes about work were coloured with Castle.

'So I ended up telling him that he'd have loved hangin' out with Grandpa, you know? Just with all the fascination for magic, and when I turned around in that storage area, he had this magician's box on his head which was … was … _what?_… Dad?'

She trailed off. Jim wore his expression as easily as she was wearing her admiration for Castle on her sleeve. Strange. Extremely different for Kate, but perhaps evolutionary. Jim couldn't work it out, but he didn't want her to think he was mocking her.

'Nothing. Please, keep going.'

He was disappointed to see his daughter check her watch, fidgeted with her cuff so that it was pulled right down over the face of the Omega, and unwind the beating of the heart that had beaten there seconds ago. 'You're smiling and squinting, Dad. You've got that look on your face, the one you get when you're going to … to … you know? Say something.'

'Say _something?_' asked Jim, pursing his lips and squashing a grin in the exact way Kate always did to Castle.

'Yeah. Wise guy.'

Reaching out and holding hands with his daughter across the table, Jim marvelled at how much easier this form of touching had become in the last few years. After Johanna died and he'd lived as though on borrowed time, he and Kate had been less demonstrative. It'd been awkward, lacking impulsiveness, and Jim blamed the booze. The natural, give-take of comfort, hugs, hand holds had returned to their relationship with the giving of his sobriety, with her taking of his watch.

'A wise guy, hey? I don't know what you mean.'

'C'mon, Dad. You get that look when you're going to ask me about dating. About a guy. Remember when I was at school?'

Jim watched as she blushed. She played with the stem of her glass with her free hand, then the spoon as it clattered against the sundae bowl, and finally the edge of her sleeve as it contrasted with the black of her watch band and the flush to her skin. He loved her when she was like this, so much more relaxed and open. His daughter, someone that was as hard to reach as himself and had as many places to bury her grief as he did. It had been an age — from late teens to womanhood — since he'd seen her so lighthearted. Not joyful, not serene, but less inhibited.

_Alive._

'So this Rick Castle? He reminds you of your Gramps?'

In typical Beckett fashion, Kate dropped eye contact with Jim but he didn't let her release her hand. She was still smiling when he gave her a reassuring squeeze. 'A little. He's quirky. Loves stuff like gadgets and magic, and I dunno? He's fun. I guess that's what it could be, right?'

'Grandpa was certainly that,' he said, patting Kate's hand and letting it go. He wondered what she was going to say about Castle next, but he didn't have to wait long.

'He's great for the team. Helps us get the job done.'

Jim longed to say something about the effect of the novelist on Kate, but it wasn't what they did. If her mother was sitting here, moderating between the teasing paternal figure and the 'oh, dad' scoff of their daughter, it would have been a perfect flow and ebb. Johanna could question, comment, dispatch advice if it was required, while he could ruffle and nudge.

It was the duty of the dad. That, and make life hard for the new guy in his daughter's life. Or the old one.

'Sounds like he's a real asset, Katie. Might like to meet him sometime.'

Kate shifted restlessly in her seat and Jim didn't need to be related to a Homicide detective to realize that she was walking the absurd line between revealing too much about Castle and wondering what she'd actually said that would make her father want to meet him. She sipped her coffee and looked out the window.

'He'd probably like that. He'd know your entire life story within the first few minutes, though.

Jim laughed. If felt awkward asking her about her feelings for Rick Castle and why this Dr Davidson guy didn't remind her of Grandfather (or at least someone worth talking about) then he could heckle. 'He's a writer, so I guess they wanna know it all. Speaking of which? I read 'Naked Heat' in the last few weeks. Now I gotta say that his writing? Well it doesn't remind me of Gramps.'

_Gotcha!_

He had thought nothing could make Kate as flustered as the night he'd asked a newish boyfriend if he understood the correlation between smoking and lung cancer. _'He smells like a wet dog,'_Jim had muttered to Johanna, as he'd watched his daughter stalk away from the house into her date night.

But with this mention of 'Naked Heat', Jim spied another facet of his young girl, and how she squirmed, running her hand through a wayward strand of hair, blushing so completely that it looked like she was putting up her hand to fan herself.

'Jeez, Dad! Will ya look at the time,' she said, trademark grin flashing the face between watch and cheekbones. 'It's getting late. I've gotta get up early tomorrow.'

Kate rose in a swish of long coat and mussed hair. Jim wanted to laugh as she stumbled slightly in an attempt to push back her chair, don the coat she'd picked up from the next seat, and reach for her purse. _Oh, Kate._ She was simultaneously little girl, clumsy teenager, and unsettled woman. Although he'd missed some of her metamorphosis during the time in his grief cocoon, he was here now. With her, _for_her, as she buzzed around, flapping her wings about Castle and work and magic.

He'd been sober for years on her watch. Now it was time for Kate to pour her own obsessions down the sink and get drunk on life itself. If only she'd allow it.

'Night, Dad.'

'Until next time, sweetheart.'

To Jim Beckett, this sounded infinitely more hopeful.

* * *

><p>She couldn't remember being so psychologically exhausted.<p>

She could, but Kate tried not to dwell on the emotions around her mother's death and relate them to the period in her life that had just passed. _As though she had a choice._Of course these moments in time would weigh her down like the heaviest heart in an opened chest, and she'd been here before — on a precipice so darkened, the only way she could tell if it was daytime was to check it on her watch.

Now it was night. The Omega told her so.

When she finally wove her threaded body into her bedroom, there were two triggers of memory that bulleted her mind. After all the recent horror — Raglan being shot a baby's breath from where they sat, Ryan and Esposito being detained, staring down Lockwood in a room so dim, she'd seen the man for the vampire he was — Kate's mind obsessed over two snatches of time. She'd almost neglected her nightly routine. But there she stood, unchaining her mother's ring, placing her watch as a protective circle around the most valued things she'd ever own.

_Her own version of apron strings._

Strings that had been cut years ago, when she'd least expected it to happen, so she'd substituted the strings with objects to keep her mother's memory close, her father's presence valid.

She shut the lid on the monstrosity of the day. If it was only that easy, but everything was still hiding within. Her fear, her loathing, her desperation. Shit, even her _desire_, but it was two unrelated events that monopolized the space as she closed her eyelids upon the carnage.

Kate had wanted to kill. With every pulse of the ticker in her temples, bumping against her brain and hurting her head, she'd wanted to shed Vulcan Simmons' blood. She would have throttled him in an old-fashioned, maiming way, then slaughtered him. This sudden wave of blood lust in the dead of night didn't frighten her. It was as real as her apron strings, as visceral as the after-effects of where she'd kissed Castle.

_Back_. Where she'd kissed him back. Because she had.

She couldn't go _there_ right now. It was better to focus on the release she had enjoyed as she slammed Simmons against the glass, rather than ponder the complexities of her reactions to Castle. Simmons evoked hatred, her aggression, while Rick — _Castle_, she corrected herself — he evoked … _yeah, what the hell did he evoke?_

As she'd hammered Simmons into his freedom while behaving like a goddamn rookie, the winders of her Omega had embedded into the skin of her wrist. It happened occasionally, when Kate crunched offending suit lapels and had to buckle her hands to enforce some strength. The pain was negligible. Tonight, she could feel the remnants of tiny divots — two small holes — in the upper part of her hand, and it was taking her back to that interrogation room.

To the sight of his oily demeanor, the smell of his arrogance, the cadence of her heartbeat as it escalated to ramming speed. The feel of Castle to her left, as reliable and steadfast as her own watch arm, not knowing that he would be the one with real damage to his hand before this episode in their lives had finished.

Kate rolled onto her stomach. She didn't pause to wonder what it would feel like to have Castle in her bed, stroking her back, wiping away her tears with his non-bandaged hand. She was _with_Josh, whether he was working abroad or back in the country. She had as much right to imagine Rick rubs as she did to demand he stay with her on the case, but he had. Plucky sidekick, Homicide detective.

_Is that what they were?_

She'd been sure to scramble her watch up under her sleeve just before she stepped into the ambulance, and she'd prepared her Chuck Norris reference prior to seeing him. Kate needed the script. There was too much to be said to allow seconds of silence to pass between them as unoccupied space. She might be tempted to tell him how much he meant to her, how much she valued his hanging around, how much she wanted to … felt like she wanted to … or just plain _wanted to ..._

What, now?

Castle was as readable as his latest manuscript. His pain was as bluntly obvious as the duo of winding divots that poked into the skin at her wrist, and his poker face was nonexistent. She wanted to fix him just as he'd mended her watch, and although he hadn't been burnt in an explosion, his bandaged hand mirrored the one on her forearm after her apartment exploded. It reflected their combined wounds of this damn war.

Rearranging his dressing gave her something to do with her hands. Something other than winding them through his hair to comfort him, or ticking them along the line of his inner arm to check for other sites of soreness. The paramedic had done an adequate job as far as she could tell, but there was something so binding about reworking his bandage that by the time he'd told her _always_, she was more in synch with Castle than she had been during their kiss. Than perhaps she'd ever been with anyone.

It was her ultimate act of intimacy. She bandaged in the role of friend, as an act of mercy, though if Kate was honest with herself, it was performed to prolong the contact. She wanted to absorb his warmth and dependability, and in turn, to nurture and thank.

If the timing had been kinder, Kate might be able to offer more, but the face of her watch reminded them both that there were still in this holding pattern. Stagnant at 'defer-o'clock' and unwilling or unable to act until some sort of eleventh-hour injunction to their lives.

Had she been more confident of what they _were_, a kiss of gratitude might have been more appropriate in the back of an ambulance, considering what they'd confronted. Yet the memory of removing the dressing, only to rework the depth, the pressure, _god_, the skin contact, had her flushing more than that kiss. That kiss. _A kiss or a cover? A covering kiss or a kiss that was covering something else? So much more than the lips that bequeathed and the mouth that received …_

As Kate lay on her scrunched-up pillow, feeling the echo of her heart almost climb into the mattress beneath her ribs, she felt for the tiny blunted marks her watch had left on the back of her wrist. They were gone, just like the dragon-waged heat of the past few days of her life. As fleeting as time itself. As important for she and Castle as their yet-to-be determined eleventh hour decree.


	6. Chapter 6

_Last part of this one. Thanks for the read. Enjoy the weekend.  
><em>

* * *

><p><strong>Part 6: Life &amp; Times:<strong>

Time waits for no woman.

In the interest of national security and the threat of a dirty bomb on her hometown, Kate didn't have a spare moment to reflect on the inverse relationship between her father's watch and the illuminated red dial attached to the explosive.

Time moving on. Seconds ticking away. The positivity of watch progression, the negation of the countdown machine.

It was only when they were alone for a couple of minutes after the event that Kate allowed herself to consider how night had become day within the flash of an instant. She wondered how long it might be before they could leave the precinct and debrief alone, because shouldn't there be some sort of countdown clock set on them actually talking about the time in the freezer?

Time moving. Seconds ticking.

As Mark Fallon wandered off into the sunset after another desperate victory for the batting team, Castle turned to look at her. Kate wanted it easy. She wanted the familiarity between them — the friendship, the sizzle — to suddenly evolve into something else. Something for _now_. She needed the days, weeks, months to crank by so that they were both in a place where they just _could._

Where they could be.

Where she could move into his arms, snag some heat, more comfort, and it wouldn't be awkward. Where he could run his hand over the back of her head and murmur things about their near-death experience and it would be normal for both of them. Where she could go back in and chat with the guys, share another beer, but keep Castle within her sights when her watch told her it was time to go home. When her internal clock wound the springs so tightly that she'd snap at his gaze, coerce him with her eyes and they'd walk out of the precinct on the same page.

She'd hold his hand. He'd nudge her with each step they took towards the elevator, and they'd go home to a meal and their bed. They'd talk about their hell-of-a-day. About everything, until the time that Kate's eyes slipped downwards and he'd snuggle her into a mattress that rested between bedside tables containing a photo of Alexis, a precious jewellry box and items of sheer normality.

Time marching onwards, seconds wasting away.

The vivid blue of her top reflected in Castle's eyes. As she stood there waiting to hear what he'd been thinking, allowing her mind to roam free of her reality and into a future where the dirty bomb hadn't impacted the city, Kate noticed the shift. It was subtle, but for someone that knew Castle's eyes so well, she detected the flattening of colour. The offset of his gaze.

Before she could contemplate what Rick'd been thinking and whether it would mesh with her own fantasy-clad ideas, she was enveloped in the leather of her own actuality. Josh was gentle, masculine and right behind her, offering her all the time in the world — moments to be alone while he was a doctor without the boarder of a relationship. Months of future happiness as the partner of a cardiac surgeon, even years of perfect programming, as they aged together, made a home, maybe created a family.

But as she watched Castle go, the alarm in her head told her it was nearly time to make a stand, because although time stood still for no man, timing was _everything._The countdown clock had taught her that.

* * *

><p>She'd almost stopped the constant measuring. The number of people involved in her mother's death, the amount of time her father had been sober, the infinite moments she'd been confused about Rick Castle's place in her life.<p>

And the scream of minutes between Montgomery's call to her cell and her arrival at the hangar.

He'd called her once. Castle had phoned twenty-three times, and although Kate was immersed in case files and concentration, she could imagine the conversation scenarios in her head. She tried to clear them. She even drank the monkey-pee coffee that was so offensive to his palate — and now to hers — in order to enhance the bitterness she was tasting. Why try to sweeten anything at this stage? Not when the words they'd cankered about in her apartment were drowning her taste buds in anger.

Yeah, Beckett, and in regret.

_Jesus, Castle, get outta my brain,_but although her thoughts were on Roy's lead and the traffic delays prolonging her trip to the hangar, the possibilities of their cell exchanges were haranguing her head.

_'Tell me that you're one of the people who love me, Rick.' _

She hadn't uttered the words, but God, she wanted him to hear everything that was roaring round the inside of her car. In just _one _of the twenty-three possible phone conversations, Kate needed him to acknowledge something. She'd never call him back. There wasn't time, nor was there enough excess energy to mute the chatter in her mind.

'And what about you?'

'I'm sorry, Kate. Don't risk your life for this, they're gunning for you and I can't protect you. We can't win this one, but I'll always try to help you move that rubber tree plant. We can work out another way.'

'They killed my mother. What do you want me to do.'

'Walk away. Walk away because I love you. Don't leave me, I can't lose you. But I can help you. We can do it together, another way. I _am_ one of those people, and you know it, Beckett. You're trying _not_to recognize it, but it's as clear as the dedication in the first book.'

'As the chain round your neck.'

'As the watch on your wrist.'

A truck honked at her and Kate had to stop herself crying out in anguish. 'Castle!' she muttered, but it was all guttural and grainy, bitter coffee refuel. 'Get the hell out.'

_Now get out._

Kate's hands were on the steering wheel, her foot on the gas, but her head was somewhere between her apartment, the talk she'd had with Roy, and her imagined phone conversations with Castle. She illuminated her watch. The length of tonight's journey was nearly as frustrating as having Castle's voice work like an MP3 player. At least if he was accompanying her to the meeting, she'd be able to let him prattle on with his usual inanities and get the occasional laugh. Having him tick away in her head with a rehash of the monkey-pee they'd swung around her apartment was so much worse than driving alongside the real deal.

Regrets? She'd face them tomorrow. But anger?

She tried to swallow that with the rocket fuel bile that threatened to surface with the 'third cop" text she received as she approached Montgomery. She was late, according to her watch, but Roy was later to the thinking party if he believed she would retreat into the night.

'I forgive you. I forgive _you_.' All of them.

_Her father for sinking into the sauce bottle, Montgomery for his part in her murky history, Johanna for dying before any of them were ready, and Castle. If she was granting absolution to the dead and departing this night in blue, she might as well reach for Rick and ask him for clemency for her fighting words._

She'd forgiven him.

Wearing her mother near her heart and her dad at holster level as she stepped into this emotional time-rift — where the past was her present, but would tonight decide her future — Kate realized she'd forgiven Castle. She didn't know whether he'd forgiven her.

When he materialized out of the rift, wrapped his arms around her and jammed her wrists into his body, she'd run out of uncertainties. She was carried into her future with the only pieces of her past that made any sense. And her love was definite.

* * *

><p>She wore her dress uniform like some women donned a new pair of work pants and a drab, grey blouse. It felt formal, restrictive, almost repressive. It befitted the funeral of her captain. The soberness of black and the relief of white stamping the ideals of a pure police life set against the dark overtones of a society corrupted.<p>

A time to live. A time to give into temptation, a time to show remorse. A time to die. Steady and inevitable, like the cadence of the military band as it piped the procession of the coffin into the reaches of family and friends gathered in the New York sun.

Kate carried her friend. Her gaze shot straight ahead, her hair was pulled into the tightest knot she could manage — as though the tension from it could soothe the savage forehead-ache that threatened to crush her skull — and she lead her brothers into the light. She felt Castle. As solid as Roy's coffin was, Rick's presence made the wood of the casket appear flimsy.

When she'd dressed for the day, pulling her white gloves over the bulk of her watch, she had shed a tear for Royce. The sadness melded with her grief for Roy, but the memory of Royce's words allowed Kate a small smile as she recalled his disapproval about wearing the watch with her uniform. It _would _get snagged on something and cause damage or danger in a policing situation. If only he knew that the watch would make her aware of the pulse at her wrist and the pain of grief in her chest during today's farewell.

She prepared for the eulogy like some folk might prime themselves for the start of a skill session. She focused, and with that concentration she remembered something about grief from the Chinese medical practitioner that Maddie used to consult. Lungs. Constriction or pain in the chest relating to lung problems — relating to grief — and all of a sudden during her heartfelt words, Kate felt her sorrow take that form. Physical and immediate.

The lung pain? It was excruciating, and she wondered briefly why Castle was making it worse by barging forward and knocking them sideways.

Her necklace bobbled beneath her shirt, and Kate felt her mother's ring threatening to cut off her oxygen supply by nestling in the nook between her voice box and sternum. Everything was so damn tight. Her lungs expanded with the full force of her grief, for everything past, for her present sorrow, for her future. Try as she might, Kate couldn't nullify the bereavement on Castle's face as he pressed down against her … tightening everything. _Why was everything so constricted?_ The strain of her hair against the hardness of the ground, the restriction of her collar on her throat, the necklace that must be choking her, causing her to have breathing difficulties, her father's watch creating pins and needles in her hands.

A countdown clock stripping away the time left in her existence, or an Omega on restart, welcoming her to the commencement of her second chance on life?

She couldn't tell that, though she had been shot. The lung pain was from a bullet — but God, grief felt just as bad — was she grieving to death? Castle appeared to be, but was she?

Kate didn't know, but as she strained to tell Castle to shush, _just shush so she could reciprocate some words of love and sorry and not leaving — but staying_, she couldn't maintain her vision. After the tremor of darkness, the shards of blur and wash of memories, she looked upwards again and Lanie moved into her line of vision to loosen the tension in her world.

Her hair was freer, her neck more weightless and the chaffing at her collar was lessened. Something gave around her waist, perhaps her belt, but Kate couldn't inflate her own chest. Then she could, but something was wrong with her mouth, it was looser, freer, but they were pressing on her mouth, trying to stop her speak.

It was only when she felt the removal of her mother's ring, the snatching away of her watch from wrist muscles that could no longer form a fist, that Kate realized she was dying. She must be, with everything being wrestled away?

She wasn't. Not really. Her parents would never forsaken her at the moment of death and the tangible tokens of their family were being taken away, preserved on ice to be worn another day when times were better. _Clearer?_

_Don't take my things. Castle! Don't let them take my things!_

Kate wanted her dad's watch back. She'd earn it as surely as someone might earn a medal presented by the city, and her mother would encourage her to fight. She entered the ring knowing the pain of the struggle and willing the return of her favourite sparring partner.

He was just outside her door.

* * *

><p>Time waits for no one.<p>

During days when her pain was so debilitating, Kate cried for the hours to steam by, but the moments spread out like endless green lawn of a sunlit cemetery. She was lying down. She couldn't see the hope of the horizon. Minutes and months, entirely unmeasurable on the watch that stood sentry from her father's bedside table, lasted forever.

Jim had put Johanna's ring and chain within his watch band. When Kate craned her neck to check on the slow coach of time, the familiarity bought her comfort.

On nights when she noticed the kiss of recovery around her gills, Kate wished for the hours to cruise to morning, Perhaps tomorrow she'd sit up without assistance, maybe she'd keep food down and be hungry for more, she'd walk to the bathroom, drink coffee with her dad at the kitchen table or exercise without restriction.

Maybe the heaviness near her heart might dissipate and she'd stay awake for the entire day. Perhaps she'd clear her mind of Castle, or her daydreams would be pleasant puffs of pain free periods and ease of coping.

During the months that Kate reacclimatized to life, she weathered the storms of uncertainty, confronted work situations, renewed relationships and tried to forge new ones. It was as though she held a stopwatch over the segments of her life. She stepped into one frame, became Katie or Detective Beckett or Kate, only to have that segment frozen, finished, and wrapped for the next.

When the gloom finally set on a lacklustre year of recovery, renewal and redefinition, time started to move by with a greater swiftness. Not that Kate wanted the moments to flash before her eyes or the sands to crash through the hourglass. She actually yearned to taste each second, make it count, and balance the fact that time moved so slowly when she was disabled compared to the frantic pace of life prior to Roy's death.

There must be some middle ground.

But on one of the happiest mornings she could remember, time flashed by with the speed of a sniper bullet to the lung. If she had blinked, she might have missed it, yet the images of smiles splashed with tears etched into the pressed flowers she preserved from that day. She wasn't a pressed flower type of person. The Kate of old hadn't been a lot of things. Nowadays, flowers were grown to be smelt, admired for the colour they added to life, held close. _Pressed_.

'You need to say _I do_, Kate.'

'I will.'

'No. Not _I will_, but _I do_, Beckett.'

'_Castle! _I know!'

'Well, if you know, then say it. Um, don't say _'it'_, you need to say _I_—'

'If you don't stop now, I won't say anything. Then what'll you do?'

The laughter from the intimate gathering echoed the sentiments from family and friends. It was traditional, but not. She wore white, but wasn't bridal, and Castle looked like he could be walking into a downtown office for a publishing appointment.

It was the dazzle of his smile that was different. The thrill-beat to her heart that was significant.

His daughter mixed with her dad, his mother held court over the Beckett brotherhood from the precinct, and her friends saw an evolved Kate Becket. Someone who had taken time by the band and reset her dial when she'd been told her days were numbered by a sniper. The detective who had once lived the job, now the woman who enjoyed the air at either end of the working day.

Their marriage celebrant had Castle talking about the signs of the universe already working for their union. Upon hearing word of the occasion, Evelyn Montgomery stepped into the light and offered her services, lending a remarkable clause to the grief-joyous spectrum that breached a day in the life of her father's watch.

* * *

><p>Eventually, they bury him next to Johanna. His watch is so well worn into her wrist by this stage of her life that it no longer bites with memories of her father, face down and timed-out on her apartment floor. It's imbued with something else. Something <em>more<em>. Time management, making each moment count, grabbing the second hand by the teeth and flying wherever it decides to sweep past.

They lay him to rest peacefully. Kate walks away comforted by this knowledge, taking Castle's hand when the mood becomes grave and the chill licks at the base of her spine.

Afterwards, they eat Italian. It was Johanna's favourite, of course, and her father will get a kick out of the checkered tablecloths, the great pizza, the chilled Chianti in the wicker-wound bottles.

As she reaches out to take the menu from the waiter, her sleeve hitches up over the face of her dad's Omega and she stares at it so intensely, she forgets the menu until Castle collects it. Kate can feel him watching her, the warmth of his smile, the crinkle of his eyes as he aims his grin at her heart. Jim? Rick? The duo of good cops who lost their lives to bad decisions?

'Here's to a wonderful man,' says the one sitting on her right.

The cuff of her shirt drifts over the face of the watch as Kate raises her glass for old time's sake.

**End**


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